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Using the Semantic Web to Enhance Search
RobMcCool writes "At Stanford KSL, we really like the Semantic Web. So we've taken many of our favorite web sites, scraped them, and put together a huge pile of RDF, which we'll let you download. We've used that RDF to create a search application, in the spirit of Google Q & A or Microsofts recently announced MSN Search extensions. Our search can answer simple factual queries like the previously discussed population of Portugal but can also answer some more complex ones. We also have a smart autocomplete system, type "tom hanks birth" slowly to see it in action (best with Firefox). We're looking for people to be a part of this search system by running their own search sites, and by putting their data on the Semantic Web. Come check it out!"
Semantic-driven search engines have awesome potential. However, it does place a lot of demand on the content provider to provide metadata-rich content - or to be able to provide intelligent mining tools to create metadata from existing sites.
This is definitely one to watch...
Autocomplete is a useless feature that nobody wants to see when the type "a"...and see it load everything that beings with "a". The user is not interested in items starting with "a". Perhas they're interested in terms beging with "anon" or something, which has many fewer items to load, therefore making the load time much faster and not annoying the user in the process.
Or, even better, never have any autocomplete turned on automatically. Do a VB-like idea, where if you want to see possibilities at a certain point, hit a specific key that will register for the list to pop down.
The Stanford research is interesting, but I'm still trying to make up my mind about the Semantic Web, learning about RDF, and whether I need to bake in ways of handling these kinds of assertions in my web app. The Stanford group writes, "Our hope is that our search application spurs development of the Semantic Web, and leads to sites publishing their data in this format so that we don't have to." It obviously takes more work to encode such information and getting user contributions auto-marked for the semantic web. For a counter viewpoint, take a look at some of Clay Shirky's work -- in particular:
Will the semantic web be supported by future versions of Drupal, phpBB, and other grass-roots content management web apps? Not sure. Since a lot of the content is visitor generated, you would have to build in ways of providing easy markup. Would be interested to hear /. thoughts on the matter.
No, 'works best with Firefox' is just as bad as 'works best with IE'. What would be nice would be to see 'works best with any standards compliant browser'.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Does it have a countermeasure against 'semantic spam'?